


Why He Let Her Stay

by DWEmma



Series: Why They Stayed [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-12 10:37:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19944799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DWEmma/pseuds/DWEmma
Summary: Giles always had terrible timing. And he and Anya confessing their feelings for each other before the final confrontation with Glory was terrible timing. It wasn’t the night they were hoping for, but she still wasn’t going to skedaddle. She was going to stay and love him.





	Why He Let Her Stay

The morgue came for the body. Or was it just normal EMTs? Anya wasn’t sure who it was who came for bodies, to take them away. 1000 years of causing injuries, sometimes causing death, and she had never stuck around to see the body taken away. But here she was, standing just as helpless as any other mortal, watching a body that had formerly been alive be carted off. And it was just as senseless as it had been with Joyce. It was stupid, that whole death thing. Mortality was stupid. 

She had stood back, not really part of this. She was an honorary Scooby, perhaps, though now that she and Xander were broken up she wasn’t so sure of her status. And now that Buffy was gone, she supposed it didn’t matter. Without the slayer, they didn’t need a team to support her. And the worst part was that Anya wasn’t sure she even ever liked Buffy. Or that Buffy had ever liked her. Actually she was positive that Buffy didn’t like her, but she was never one to let that have an affect on whether or not she liked someone back. She and Giles had hated each other when they first met. Well, he found her irritating and she was mad that Giles-from-another-dimension had made her mortal. Same thing. And now they were in love. 

Well they had been a few hours ago. Who knows what Giles could change his mind about now that he’d lost his charge. 

Unlike the rest of them, Anya wasn’t staring at the place where the body had been. She was watching Giles. She knew him. She knew that momentarily he as going to snap into action and start trying to take care of people, be the patriarch everyone expected him to be. He was going to do this despite the fact that it was the last thing he needed to do to help himself heal. And whether or not he had changed his mind about wanting to try being with her, she had not changed her mind. So she was going to save him from himself. 

So she walked up behind him, slowly, so he could feel her coming. She lay a hand on his upper arm, gently, making sure not to startle him. She spoke as quietly as she knew how, since her words were just for him. “There’s nothing else you can do here, Rupert. I’m going to take you home, okay?” 

“No, I’ve got to...someone has to take care of...what about Dawn?” he stuttered, looking over at the crying girl who was no longer mystical. Finally a real girl, but a real girl without a family. But she wasn’t crying alone. Tara and Willow had their arms around her, and Xander had his hand on her shoulder. 

“She’s being cared for. Now let me care for you.” 

“Anya, I…”

“Rupert, I’m not holding you to any pleasant suggestions or promises you might have made to me before. Certainly not tonight, and not in the future if this has changed your mind. But I didn’t just say that I lusted for you. I said I love you. And right now I don’t careif you don’t feel the same way. Just let me take care of you. Let me love you. You need to be loved right now.” 

He paused for a moment. And then he actually looked at Anya for the first time in the conversation. She looked back at him with no judgement or motives, just open sympathy. So he nodded, turned, and they walked back to his car. 

“Do you want me to drive?” Anya asked, still keeping her voice quiet, knowing that her normal tone might make him jump, and if he jumped, he might flee. She could sense the fight or flight in his muscles. 

“No, I bloody well don’t, Anya. I’ve seen you drive. And you can’t tell me know you know how to drive stick,” he scolded her, with a look of mirth on his lips that didn’t quite touch his eyes. 

“I was just offering to help, Rupert. I’m just making this up as I go along,” she sulked, and he tossed his arm around her as an apology. 

“I appreciate your offer. But I can drive.” 

*  *  * *

When they got to his place, he locked the door behind him and set some basic wards, though with Glory gone, they clearly needed less protection than they had before. But then he got that lost look in his eyes again. He had been fine when there was something to do, a car to drive, protection to put in place, but he now realized why he had wanted to put it on himself to take care of Dawn: feeling useful took away his feelings of loss. But he had trusted her, trusted that she knew what he needed, and now they were alone in his apartment and all he had was his grief. He felt himself tremble, and when she wrapped herself into his arms, he allowed it, relaxed into it, almost indulged in it. Then he began to cry. 

She held him. She didn’t murmur comfort, or tell him it was going to be right again. She knew it wouldn’t, not for a long time. But she did for him what he had wanted to do for others: she was there while he mourned. After a long while, the crying let up for a moment, and she scooted him off to the bathroom. 

“Take a shower. It’ll make you feel better. I’ll have your robe and a glass of scotch ready for you when you’re done. She leaned into her practicality and efficiency when she didn’t know what else to do. He found that endearing. So he nodded. 

He stayed in the shower longer than a person should in a state that seemed to be in perpetual drought. He thought of England, the rain, the damp air, and longed for home. Though his inherited properties had never felt like home, even when he would spend summers there as a boy. They might feel like home to those he leased them to. Until recently, this California flat had felt as much like home as anywhere else. But now it all felt wrong. He felt shiftless. Homeless. He began to cry again, flooding the clean water with the salt of his tears, and letting them all go down the drain together. 

He looked at his body, the skin he occupied, and briefly had a flash of what he would have been doing with his body if tonight had gone slightly differently, if they’d gotten Dawn back from Glory before any of her blood had been spilled. He let himself dwell for a moment on the fantasies that he’d had over the last year, of Anya’s body pressing against his, the types of pleasure he could release in her if given the chance. And here he was, given that chance, and it all felt empty to him now. Not so much the idea of sex with her, since as much as she clearly feared he had changed his mind, he did love her. It wasn’t that he didn’t want HER. He just didn’t understand the purpose of sex any more. It all seemed hopeless. 

He turned off the water as he felt it start to go cool, and dried himself off. He found his robe hung from the hook on the inside of the door and his scotch resting near the sink. She had somehow managed to come into the bathroom and care for him without his even noticing. It was a gesture that could have gone either way: he could have felt smothered and invaded or he could have felt very cared for. He felt the later. He honestly couldn’t remember anyone ever apprehending his needs like that without being paid to do so by his parents. He wrapped the robe around his body and took a sip of his scotch. It tasted like release. 

When he entered his lounge area, he found Anya splayed on his couch, bare feet up on the other end, a glass of wine in hand reading a novel she must have found on his shelves mixed in with the occult and esoterica. She looked correct, there. She looked comfortable, as if the last year of their lives had been very different, and she had been with him all along. She looked like she lived there. 

“Hi,” she said, putting down her book on the end table, perched open to her spot. “Feel a little bit better? Fresher, at least?” 

“Did I stink that badly?” asked Giles, sitting at the other end of the couch, lifting her feet so they were in his lap. 

“No!” she exclaimed. “Well a little, but that wasn’t why you needed the shower. I was right, though, you did need one, right?” 

“Anya, you’re always right,” he stated, dryly. 

“Damn, I should have gotten a recording of that for the next time I need it,” she grinned at him, and he briefly grinned back, until the grins fell off both of their faces. 

“So I seem to have let you put yourself in charge of tonight. What do I do next?” asked Giles. 

“We need to eat,” replied Anya. “Eating sustains.” 

“Very wise, indeed. And what shall we eat?” 

“Well I looked through your pantry. I believe our options are either beans on toast or cheese toast.”

“How delightfully British of my pantry,” smirked Giles. It was the closest to a smile he had gotten. “Let’s do beans on toast. But I’ll make it.” 

“You don’t trust my culinary skills?”

“For British comfort food? Not bloody likely.” 

“Can I watch how you do it? I want to be able to take care of you properly in the future.” 

And he shifted his weight towards her on the couch, simultaneously pulling her onto his lap. He kissed her with warm, wet, closed lips. She received the kiss with gently parted lips and closed eyes. It wasn’t a kiss with any sexual intent to it. Just deep devotion and emotional feeling. It wasn’t the first kiss either of them had spent a year imagining. They had both pictured it with dueling tongues and clothes being scattered and sexual desperation. But this kiss was somehow better than the one they had imagined. It was devotional. 

She climbed off of his lap so he could get up and make them the light supper. She watched the steps it took, making a note of the order of things for the future. When the plates were prepared, they casually settled back down on the couch to eat. 

“And what is the next step in our evening?” asked Giles, after swallowing a bite of his childhood comfort food. 

“Well tomorrow will be busy. There’s a lot to arrange. And before you interrupt to tell me that I don’t have to help with the arrangements, don’t be ridiculous. I’m terrific at making phone calls, and I’m the only one who won’t let people add funereal surcharges to things. They take advantage of people in their grief, you know. But they won’t be able to take advantage of me.” 

“You are a stern negotiator,” Giles admitted.

“And don’t forget it,” warned Anya. “Tonight should be about relaxing and dealing with your feelings. So I’ve got a few choices. We could get drunk, though that would make tomorrow harder. You could pull out your guitar, and play sad songs. Or we could put on loud music on your anachronistic record player. Or we could get into your bed, and I could pet your hair. Those are your options.” 

“Might I mix and match?”

“Yes.” 

“We should both have a second drink, though not enough to cause hangovers tomorrow. We should lie on the floor by the record player with loud sad music, and you can pet my hair if you’d like.”

“I would like.”

“All right, then.” He got up to get them more drinks. Then he smiled at her sadly. The comforting thing about Anya’s honesty was that she appreciated it in others. He didn’t need to tiptoe with her. “This isn’t the evening we planned.”

She was placing pillows on the floor by the record player speakers, and settled down on one. “We’ll have that evening. Eventually. I’m not going anywhere. Unless you ask me to.”

He brought the drinks over, and settled on the pillow with his head on her lap. He looked up at her face with what would have been a smile in other circumstances. “Don’t go even if I ask you to. I have a history of being a dense idiot.” 

She began to pet his hair. “Yes. You do. But you’re my idiot.” 


End file.
